I swear Joel Silver and the boys at Dark Castle just keep making the same damn film in a nicer looking house. I can picture the gray-bearded man right now, sitting behind a desk in a plush leather chair, tapping his fingers together, trying to decide at which overtly posh location he shall strike next. The House on Notting Hill is surely on the way next.

Once again deciding to rely entirely on creepy art direction, set design, and half-assed CGI, Silver is back again at the whole "haunted house" game. Last time he handed up a haunted insane asylum (House on Haunted Hill) and a group of under- or overrated actors and said "boo." This time he hands us Shannon Elizabeth, Tony Shalhoub, Matthew Lillard, F. Murray Abraham, all sequestered in a glass house with Latin written across its walls -- oh yeah, and let's not forget the comic relief nanny (Rah Digga).

A genuinely spectacular waste of money -- and about as mind-numbing as you'd expect from a movie which brags in ads that its "R" rating is for violence, gore and nudity -- "Thirteen Ghosts" has nothing going for it beyond its wildly excessive production design.

The star of the movie is an all-glass haunted house, designed by a grandiose and evil ghostbuster (F. Murray Abraham) to be a combination phantasm prison and gateway to hell. The joint has thousands of Latin "containment spells" etched into its transparent walls -- walls which move and shift to reconfigure rooms, thus trapping screaming B-list actors in with half-decayed, psycho-killer apparitions. (In the only worthwhile nod to William Castle's "13 Ghosts" from 1960, the characters have to wear special glasses to see the spooks -- much like the audience did for the 3D-like original.)

The house also has at its center a huge clock-like mechanism of gears and gyro-gadgets, apparently powered by the psychic energy of 12 enslaved spirits, which will open the aforementioned gateway only if one live person is sacrificed to become a required 13th ghost.